Don't Buy These Myths

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Today's premium grill costsónot including shipping and handlingó$5,000. It also represents what 'the good life' has become, at least in barbecue land: Even though cheaper models are still available, grills that cost more than $2,000 are, according to Frank, 'by far the hottest growing sector in the $1.2 billion-a-year industry.' The proliferation of such upscale products drives our runaway spending and boosts the ever-escalating desire that seems to infect us like a communicable disease. In another 10 years, will we be lusting after grills that also bake bread and do dishes? And where will it all stop?

MYTH #9: STUFF IS EVIL

The more bombarded we are by uncontrollable chaos, from crashing planes to brutal wars, the more we seek security through what we can control: the things we own. For most of us, stuff serves a positive purpose, even though accumulating it may result in our feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. For some, accumulation becomes pathological.

Stuff itself is not the culprit; it's our growing inability to distinguish good from bad. In Josie Rawson's 'Behind Closed Doors' (City Pages, March 12, 1997), a story about people who live in garbage houses, University of Minnesota psychiatry professor Thomas Mackenzie offers this insight: 'How do you know what's of value and what's not? All the ads, all the news scream out that 'This is important, this is essential!' And somewhere in the imagination the idea gets planted: Without this stuff, I'm without protection. I'm lost. Anything could happen. The possibilities seem infinite, in part, I suppose, because there's so little evidence that as individuals we can control much of anything.'

He suggests that the human nervous system is not evolving as rapidly as technology and information; we're at saturation point, maybe even overkill. We collect things as a way to secure meaning in the midst of confusion, even as we lose the ability to get rid of all we're made to take in. Mackenzie asserts that garbage-house dwellers were functional at first, just like everybody else. The example he cites is a woman who saved 20 years' worth of newspapers, intending to cut out the recipes. For her, says Mackenzie, 'it was a solution onceóa way to secure a future. And then, in time, it became a kind of surrender. With garbage houses, we surmise that the resources their occupants have and the demands of the universe are badly mismatched.'

While most of us remain functional, that edge is not far away: It may be as close as the pile of unread newspapers, magazines, and junk mail that hovers nearby, waiting for you to catch up. Which you will do, of course. Tomorrow.

MYTH #10 CONSUMING LESS WILL WRECK THE ECONOMY

Before you start diverting funds to your savings accountóif you even have a savings accountóconsider the damage it might cause. If everybody follows your example and quits spending, demand for products will fall and business will suffer. Then businesses will quit investing, and recession and unemployment will set in. This argument, promulgated by Keynesian-oriented economists, has merit, says Schor. But timing is everything.

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